In many situations governments have sector-specific tax and regulation policies at their disposal to influence the market outcome after a national or an international merger has taken place. In this paper we study the implications for merger policy when countries non-cooperatively deploy...

If countries anticipate Bertrand competition in tax rates, they may expend effort that makes some of their tax payers less mobile or increases the mobility of tax payers elsewhere. I provide piecemeal evidence on what activities countries use. I analyse how such activities interact with Bertrand...

Is tax competition good for economic growth? The paper addresses this question by means of a simple model of endogenous growth. There are many small jurisdictions in a large federation and individual governments benevolently maximise the welfare of immobile residents. Investment is costly:...

The rise in foreign direct investment and the increasing activity of multinational firms expose national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also lead to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple...

This paper analyses the optimal tax policy and public provision of private goods when individuals differ in two respects: income-earning ability and rationality. Publicly provided goods should be overprovided or subsidised, relative to the decentralised optimum, if society's marginal valuation...

We analyze the optimal nonlinear income tax schedule when taxpayers earn multiple incomes and differ along many unobserved dimensions. We derive the necessary conditions for the government’s optimum using both a tax perturbation and a mechanism design approach, and show that both methods...

We review the theoretical justification of consumption taxes in advanced economies, providing a systematic overview of the vast public finance literature exploring how goods and services should be taxed. Our discussion focuses on both the determinants of the optimal level of consumption taxation...

There is increasing empirical evidence that people systematically differ in their rates of return on capital. We derive optimal non-linear taxes on labor and capital income in the presence of such return heterogeneity. We allow for two distinct reasons why returns are heterogeneous: because...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model with new and old behavioral elements. Agents in the model exhibit cognitive discounting, or myopia: they discount variables far into the future at higher rates than typically implied in the benchmark model. We investigate the model under different...